Category Archives: News & Events

InSync v4 (Blackbird) Beta – Registration Open

Published July 8, 2010 | by Jaspreet | in Druva inSync, News & Events
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insync-4-beta

After a month long limited “technology preview”, Druva inSync v4 beta will now be available to all partners, customers and new registrations starting July 15th.

InSync v4.0 codenamed after the Lockheed reconnaissance aircraft -SR71 Blackbird, will showcase 4 super stunning features -

  1. App-Aware Dedupe
  2. New Blackbird Storage Engine
  3. New Redesigned Octopus WAN Optimization Engine
  4. Web 2.0 Management Console & Interactive Dashboard

First of its kind, the app-aware dedupe engine understands the data structure for applications (like Outlook & MS Office), and deduplicates data at message or logical block level. This guarantees 100% dedupe accuracy, and a significant improvement in bandwidth/storage utilization.

The new (Blackbird) storage engine now utilizes a much advanced embedded database from Oracle instead of SQL database. Less than 1MB in size, the new database simplifies installation and adds raw rocket power to the dedupe engine. The new storage architecture will support 16TB of dedupe storage with 200+ parallel connections.

The new redesigned Octopus WAN Optimization engine is designed to optimally utilize both high speed networks and weakest of WAN links. The new auto-resume feature ensures that a large file is resumed after a network interruption.

A big fan of usability, the new web console is my favourite. It’s stunningly attractive and I personally love the dashboard. The new dashboard shows some interesting statistics like data composition of backup, user activity graphs, storage growth so on.

Details & Registration
Details about the new release and registration information is given here – http://www.druva.com/insync/version-4-0-beta
Please sign-up and someone from the beta program will contact you soon.

Final Release
The final release is expected to be around Aug 10th 2010. But the dates are not finalized yet and will mostly depend on how well is the beta is accepted.

Feedback
We would soon dedicate a thread in the forums for beta discussions. Please feel free to comment here on the blog or participate in the forums. This would surely help us design your backup better.

Apple Beats Microsoft …At Last

Published May 26, 2010 | by Jaspreet | in News & Events
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Apple beats Microsoft
Its all over the news. Finally a time to rejoice for Apple fanboys.

What I find really interesting is that Apple managed to build a $50 billion company just from 30 products against over 300 products from Microsoft. Apple has learned to monetize every single phase of the product: the hardware, the apps, the e-books, the music, the movies, the peripherals, the TV shows and soon the advertising, all while making over $600 off of each iPhone.  

Meanwhile, MS thought it would do great selling $8 to $15 WinMo licenses. That might have worked if they had cornered at least 50% of the market but with less than 10%, WinMo will never be more than chicken feed with that strategy.

It’s clearly the laser sharp focus and emphasis to details what worked for Apple. Sharing an interesting quote from one of the emails I exchanged with Subinder some weeks ago  -

(Planing for this year) ……. The best analogy I can give you is a laser beam. A laser is a million-times more powerful than ordinary light of the same wattage. Secret – the beam is tightly aligned in one direction (alignment of functions), and each photon is in the same phase (the little things). That is the magic we need. You have the first steps by laying out a vision. We will need to ensure all big investments as well as little things are aligned to the BIG VISION. The “strategic fit” becomes a filter for every action, message, priority for the team.

- Subinder Khurana, Advisor and Mentor, Druva Software

For the past two years, we have kept our focus on “laptop backup”, and I think we did deliver a good product. Now the million dollar question in front of us is to dig this well deeper or find another well :)  I am sure, I have enough to learn from this story to make a decision now.

Hello World !

Published December 15, 2009 | by Jaspreet | in Druva Phoenix, News & Events, Technology & Innovation
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After long waits and about 4 months of beta program, I am extremely excited to announce the general availability of Druvaa Phoenix v1.0.

The entire team has been super busy to make this happen. And I am sure it would be quite evident when you give it a try.

Druvaa Phoenix

Reinventing Backup

Phoenix is designed ground-up for remote backups. Here are some of the key product features which make it ultra special -

  1. Global Source Based Data Deduplication – Over 90% reduction in backup time, bandwidth and storage.
  2. WAN Optimization – Understands high latency and noisy networks.
  3. Near Continuous Data Protection – snapshot/restore-points based point-in-time restores. No age-old full, incremental backups.
  4. Smart Bandwidth Scheduling - Set smart bandwidth limits for each backup schedule.

The Road Ahead

What we currently have is just a platform which will be used to showcase some market changing features -

  1. Search Based Restore – We missed this feature in v1.0, but should be available in the next v1.2 release
  2. “Blackbird SR-71“ – A new storage engine with application aware data deduplication. This should be able to match an attachment inside exchange store at New Jersey to a file stored in a file-server at Kent. This should set the standards for backup performance.
  3. Long Distance Replication – Replicate backed up data over noisy long distance IP networks.
  4. Advanced Dashboard – The second best reporting dashboard (after Google Analytics).

Application aware Agents - Phoenix currently only comes with generic Windows agent, we plan to introduce these starting v2.0

Useful Links -

I welcome you guys to download a copy and share your feedback !

Announcing inSync v3.1 Release

Published October 16, 2009 | by Jaspreet | in Druva inSync, News & Events, Products
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Happy to announce the new much awaited v3.1 release.  This is an incremental release.
Some of the highlights include  -New Release

  1. Performance improvements for full-pc sync and BMR
  2. Managed Clients Upgrade
  3. More powerful bandwidth management
  4. Sync on log-off and shut-down
  5. Upgrade for v2.2 customers

Performance Improvements
We were planning to surprise the customers by introducing a new much faster and scalable storage (code name “blackbird”), but was pulled out at the last moment because of some stability issues. It’s now being planned for next major release.

But, the new release does bring some awaited improvements and recommendations for full-PC backup and BMR (Bare Metal Restore). The users should see about 1.5-2x performance improvements in sync and restore speed.

Manage Clients Upgrade
This new exciting feature would allow the administrator to remotely upgrade the backup clients across organization. The admin would be able to “push” the updates for the users for a particular profile. But, only the clients with version v3.1 or higher would understand this new protocol, hence this feature will only be usable from v3.1.x :)

Better Bandwidth and CPU Management
With this release, the administrator would be able centrally choose and lock granular bandwidth and CPU prioritization for users of a particular profile. The admin would now be able to provision bandwidth differently for LAN and WAN based connections.

Sync on log-off and shut-down
This would be an optional setting and force user backups on log-off and shut-down for Windows based clients. This was heavily demanded by administrators managing mobile workforce.

We hope to release the v3.1 by Oct 22, 2009. Please use the link here to register for updates.

- Happy Diwali

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